Ayoka Blog

I was reading this article on eWeek Kafi sent today, where a writer gave his opinion on several predictions by Appirio mainly based around cloud computing. The article is interesting and I recommend briefly going over it, but here I’m going to focus on a couple of the points I found pretty interesting:

The first point, regarding integrations between clouds is a really good point as this is how you can add value to your cloud without having to create new functionality yourself. As everyone has seen with the popularity of Facebook and Salesforce.com third party apps, the only way to expand in Web 2.0 is to let your users provide content, and developers are the users of clouds. Google App Engine and Amazon have opened up access to other clouds as well, and I’m sure Microsoft’s Azure will provide similar functionality to its users. In fact, I think Microsoft will really put a lot of its resources in getting the cloud strategy correct and providing a straightforward path for current Visual Studio developers.

The next interesting point is about the rise of server-less medium to large enterprises, and I absolutely believe this is the logical result of going down the cloud computing path. With companies like Terremark that can host your IT infrastructure on their cloud, saving you CapEx, space, and energy, there really is a compelling reason to not have servers in the enterprise except for really specialized appliance-type servers like firewalls, VPNs, proxies and so on.

I also wanted to mention the point about private clouds, I do think as the technology becomes more mature that term will make about as much sense as private electric grids, you really don’t need them unless you’re doing some pretty crazy things.

Next, the point is made that BI (business intelligence) will be the next big push for SaaS-plays. While I do agree that their is certainly a lot of activity going on there from companies like Oracle as well as Salesforce, I think that other areas of the enterprise like ESBs, finance, and healthcare will experience just as much conversion to the cloud.

Finally I think you’ll find that the IT department in the enterprise and software development shops will often be the first to switch over their infrastructure to the cloud, and we’re experiencing that ourselves at Ayoka as most of our servers and applications are in the cloud already. What have your experiences been regarding or issues surrounding moving apps and infrastructure to the cloud?

For those following the latest on Rails 3.0, the news that Merb will be joining Rails is pretty exciting. Merb is an alternative MVC framework for Ruby that offers a lot more customization than Rails does and focuses on a core, efficient framework with plugins available for customizing to your hearts’ content. So what does this mean for you? First, Rails will now support a lot of the cool plugins that and options out-of-the-box, so you can choose to use JQuery instead of the default Prototype/Scriptaculous bundle Rails currently uses. Or you can use DataMapper instead of ActiveRecord and support legacy databases. This makes integrating your application with different enterprise and existing apps a lot more straightforward. Second, as a community, having a combined, unified goal once again means that much more resources dedicated to improving Rails instead of having each person working on their own framework. Finally, this means that Rails will be much faster and more efficient at its core instead of penalizing performance with features and functionality you don’t care about.

So what does the Rails + Merb merger mean to you? What feature do you anticipate the most?

I attended a webinar today hosted by Salesforce.com about their new Sites platform, something I’ve mentioned earlier on this blog and which is generating quite a bit of interest in the cloud-computing space. There was a bit of additional information I got from the webinar, including forecasted availability (GA release summer of next year), initail pricing information, and a demo of how to setup a simple site. It seems like creating a site from existing Force.com APEX pages is really easy, and getting started with a site costs nothing additional. Once you reach a certain number of page views (starting at 50K, depending on your subscription) then you pay for that additional usage. Finally, they introduced a new developer challenge for anyone who creates a Force.com Site to compete in. It’s a pretty cool way to advertise the platform as well as the developers creating interesting apps for it. So, if you have that amazing idea for a Force.com site, why not tell us about it and maybe we can help you develop it?

I just came across this really cool tool called AutoRuns from Microsoft’s Sysinternals team, and this is definitely one of the best tools they’ve got. I’ve been looking for something like this for years. Although there have always been process explorers and tools like msconfig, this takes it to a whole new level and gives you everything from services to shell extensions to browser hooks and plugins all in one interface. The best thing about it is the integration with Process Explorer, which allows you to get in depth information about the process if it is running such as memory usage, TCP/IP usage, threads, and so on. Now I finally have an easy way to see exactly what’s being started up and get rid of those pesky performance sucking apps! Are you using any tools from Sysinternals or do you have any good OS-level performance tools you’d like to share?

Since Obama announced he’s selecting the nation’s first CTO, the blogosphere and news sources in general have been buzzing about who would be most qualified or who’s most likely to be picked for the position. Names like Google’s Chief Executive Eric Schmidt or Microsoft’s Chairman Bill Gates have been tossed around, and while I think both would be really excellent candidates I have my own opinion of who’d make a really good CTO for the nation. First, here are the qualifications I think will be important for this candidate:

Extremely visionary and opinionated

I believe the ideal candidate would have strong opinions relating to the issues they’re dealing with. This is especially important because of all the lobbying and pressure that they may come under when dealing with public issues, so they need to be able to have a strong opinion on the matter to carry it forward. A wishy-washy personality will not survive in this type of environment and would constantly change course on initiatives they attempt to drive.

Track record in turning around struggling companies and initiatives

Although the government initially sponsored many of the technologies that we now use on a daily basis, a lot of the work and research being performed by academic or government related facilities is being overlooked or not finding a proper commercial outlet. Someone with a good track record of finding the gems and cutting off the projects that are not in line with their vision would be able to get more public interest in government sponsored initiatives and find viable commercial applications for them.

Diverse experience in multiple areas of technology

Whether it’s networking, security, hardware or maybe one of the latest tech buzzwords like virtualization or cloud computing, the nation’s CTO would need to be knowledgeable with a diverse range of technologies and have an ability to judge the effectiveness of certain projects and their viability, as well as what companies or organizations are best to partner with for driving them forward.

So who do I think would make an excellent candidate given these points? My vote goes to Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Not only has he been able to take a struggling company and within a few years turn it into one of the most profitable tech companies, he was able to find the important initiatives within the company and drive those forward, beating all other companies in an already saturated market and continually providing the innovation to remain in the lead.

What do you think? Who would make a really good CTO for the nation?

BTW, with Obama now turning to YouTube and other online locations for the weekly presidential fireside chats, he’s definitely got a lot of technical savvy himself. I think I’ve also seen pics of him using a Mac, if I’m not mistaken :).

You may have heard the rumors going around that Microsoft is considering switching Internet Explorer’s rendering engine to WebKit, the opensource rendering engine used in Safari and Chrome, and wondered how this could affect us as developers and consumers of web applications. Regardless of whether or not this rumor has any basis, Microsoft has certainly changed its attitude quite a bit with respect to software development and open source.

Microsoft is reacting much more quickly to emerging web standards, doing things like supporting cloud-friendly licenses for its operating systems and server software, as well as creating a roadmap for its own cloud computing platform, Azure. It’s also becoming more involved in the open source community, to the extent that the latest versions of ASP.NET will standardize on jQuery for advanced scripting instead of developing their own propietary JavaScript framework.

For developers, switching to Webkit means that there are two main rendering engines to contend with, the other being Mozilla’s Firefox and both are open source projects. This gives us a lot of flexibility and options for creating third party APIs, just as Adobe has integrated WebKit into AIR and provided a whole new API for accessing that. This also could mean that client side Javascript may become more standardized, and the need for ugly code branching would be diminished. In summary, the issues we encounter on a daily basis including the following become much easier to deal with:

• Rendering differences
• Javascript incompatibility
• Inconsistent event models
• Browser-based testing

For consumers, this means that there is another major supporter for WebKit, which will continue to drive innovation as well as create competition so that Firefox, Opera, and others continue to evolve their browsers as well. Consumers also benefit from:

• Faster and more robust Javascript engine
• Less discrepencies between different browsers
• Faster introduction of new features

So if this is a win-win situation for everyone what is stopping such a browser from being released by Microsoft? Well besides the business decisions involved, I’m pretty sure that the tight integration of IE with Windows and other Microsoft products will be a huge factor in how this can actually be implemented. It’s not easy to change such a critical part of a product’s technology without breaking things all over the place, even with extensive testing and development resources.

So Kafi sends me this link from the WSJ today about the new Force.com Sites feature, which allows companies to create public facing sites and applications on the same platform and technology you’re already using for your CRM, Partner Management, Marketing, and other Force.com based applications. I think this is a really interesting move by Salesforce and is going to be powerful play against the other cloud-based giants out there including Amazon, Microsoft’s new Azure platform, and Google App Engine. Here’s why I think this is a good move by Salesforce, how it compares to the other cloud-based platforms, and why you might or might not want to take advantage of the new capabilities.

First, Salesforce already has a really strong user base that has a lot invested in the Force.com platform. They’ve got critical data and logic built up over many years, and with Sites they can now expose that information in ways that make sense and deliver business value. Sure, you can already do that using Apex and web services, but when everything is already integrated as one package it promotes collaboration and less resistance. You can bet that Salesforce.com and savvy partners will provide some really interesting apps through AppExchange that will make putting together enterprise solutions a simple affair.

Of course, vendor lockin is a big concern, and with Sites you are definitely being locked in to the Force.com’s platform in a way that is much stronger than alternative platforms. However, looking at the main consumer of this platform, the current Salesforce user, this should not be a big problem. If I’m already trusting my data, logic, and business transactions to Salesforce then benefits of quick turnaround, data reliability, security, and uptime will completely outweigh the downside of being locked in to the platform. Also, every other cloud platform or PaaS has some amount of lockin, this one just takes it to a whole new level.

So should you seriously consider this platform for your site? If you already have invested into Salesforce and Force.com, you probably should consider it, for all the sames reasons you went with a SaaS based CRM in the first place. Even with most enterprises’ heterogenous environment, it may make sense to use it to deliver features quickly and act as that ‘glue code’ that is usually spread throughout the company intranet. I’d love to get your thought or comments!